The American Association of Political Consultants and three other organizations filed a suit aimed to invalidate the entirety of the TCPA so as to make it possible to make political robocalls to cell phones. But six of the nine justices have decided to invalidate the 2015 exception instead, stating that the 2015 update “impermissibly favored debt-collection speech over political and other speech, in violation of the First Amendment.”

Additionally, the Supreme Court saw no reason to dismantle the TCPA, as it functions without the debt-collection exception. “The remainder of the law is capable of functioning independently and would be fully operative as a law. Severing this relatively narrow exception to the broad robocall restriction fully cures the First Amendment unequal treatment problem and does not raise any other constitutional problems,” the high court said. Because of traditional severability principles, “the 2015 government-debt exception must be invalidated and severed from the remainder of the statute,” the court said.